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The Strange Brain of the World’s Greatest Solo Climber (2016)
- pauljaworski 8y agoI've always been in awe of Alex and thought, like the others in the "peanut gallery", that there must be something different about the way his brain functions. Very interesting to find out what that is!
- XalvinX 8y agoHe's not the first to come along to receive this kind of attention and even accolades from the general public, and naturally from other climbers who sometimes do this, or would like to...including, I suppose, me. Most of the ones that did receive a degree of fame from this activity, and got filmed, on TV, and whatnot are now dead. As a climber myself who sometimes freesolos even up to 400 meters "off the deck" I don't see it as bad. What is stupid as fuck, however, is doing this 'on demand' for TV and film crews, and otherwise making a thing out of it at all. Sure, go out and do your thing quietly, why not? But the only way he can continue to garner publicity (and let's be clear: money) is to push the limits more and more each time. There is only one way that can go... Will National Geographic put that on TV, when he 'craters' (as we say) and blood, brains, and chips of bone splatter across the rocks? If they are responsible they will, because by doing this stuff on TV he and they are publicizing only the "glory" side of it, never mind all the people, some quite famous, that did fucking crater... So, while I do think he has achieved some great feats, I don't like what he is doing for the reasons I just spelled out. And I don't think he will last long. Those "chewing gum" edges do snap off, bats and birds do shit slimy shits on required small edges, thunderstorms and hail storms and even snowstorms in the middle of the summer can come out of the blue sky in minutes in the mountains, and many other things can go wrong, including human error...and needless to say, human error is very frequently preceded by ego and pride....it would be very hard for someone to stay absolutely humble when the whole world is cheering him on and calling him "World's Greatest"....
- sandworm101 8y agoAs a former big wall climber I would add that articles like this forget to mention the difficulty factor. For some people a 5.10 is like walking on a sidewalk. People who would be killed by falling off a sidewalk or down a set of stairs (old people etc) rarely use harnesses. Risk is inversely related to skill and ability. At least a rock climber's fate is largely in their control. The well-traveled Yosemite stuff isn't going to shift under you. Death zone, or ice climbers, are the real crazies. They role the dice. Skill and ability means nothing when the mountain decides to collapse underneath you. And such climbers tend to die in groups, their fate linked to whoever else is on the rope. Free soloists die alone.
- st26 8y agoRisk is inversely related to skill and ability Ahem, objective hazard?
- Fricken 8y agoI personally consider the Fitz Roy Traverse to be Honnold's greatest ascent, which he did with Tommy Caldwell, and they certainly faced their share of subjective hazards on that climb: https://www.redbull.tv/video/AP-1MQAPEZX91W11/a-line-across-the-sky-part-i https://www.redbull.tv/video/AP-1MQAPEZX91W11/a-line-across-...
- gkanai 8y ago> The well-traveled Yosemite stuff isn't going to shift under you. Except when there are accidents. Like recently on El Capitan: https://www.climbing.com/news/eye-witnesses-recount-tragic-accident-on-el-caps-freeblast/ https://www.climbing.com/news/eye-witnesses-recount-tragic-a...
- foobarbecue 8y agoDoes anyone know what went wrong there yet, exactly? Just insufficient pro and unexpected fall?
- 8y ago
- donw 8y agoAlex has always been a bit... well, Alex. I'm not surprised that there is something different about his neural anatomy. Case-in-point: many, many moons ago, he hobbled into the climbing gym with approximately 50% of his limbs interred in plaster casts. Apparently, he had some sort of skiing accident, and had broken... well, lots of things. Including most of one of his hands -- only the last two fingers poked out. He then proceeded to train and climb pretty much as normal, flashing routes that I never actually managed to complete. And he wasn't showing off, either. It was just a sort of normal day of training. I can't imagine most... really, any other athlete I know doing anything like that. He's just... Alex.
- pyromine 8y agoThere is a reason people use the phrase To honnold something. Definitley a badass
- foobarbecue 8y agoBy "approximately 50% of his limbs," do you mean "one limb" or "two limbs"? I'm pretty sure he has four...
- bruthafez 8y agoThe idea that honnold is the world's greatest climber is patently absurd and false, he's just the only dude willing to do the crazy solos without a harness -- aka the world's most risk taking climber. But "greatest climber?" Lol give me a break lolololol
- Pimpus 8y agoBoth the article and the hyperlink on HN are titled greatest solo climber.
- bruthafez 8y agoHe's not the greatest solo climber g, he's the greatest solo climber who doesn't use ropes.
- pvg 8y agoYou're making it sound like the ropes are some minor incidental detail. Usain Bolt wasn't the fastest sprinter who didn't use a motorcycle.
- pdpi 8y agoThe rope doesn't make the climb easier — it just makes mistakes less costly.
- Semirhage 8y agoI’m no climber, but I have to imagine that the weight of knowing a mistake won’t in any way be mitigated by safety devices might actually make the activity harder. It seems like it would require another degree of concentration to shut out the fear of grievous injury or death, to keep the fear under wraps.
- pvg 8y agoWalking in a straight line on the sidewalk is very easy. Walking on a narrow ledge somewhere very high up isn't.
- Apaec 8y agoSorry for the stupid question but how does he get back down?
- taylorlapeyre 8y agoThere are walk-offs for almost all of the routes he free solos. For any others, he would have stashed some gear/ropes up top to rappel.
- guywhocodes 8y agoHe does a fair bit of down climbing too, he has described it as the most important skill for free soloing before
- kzrdude 8y agoThere seems to be plenty of routes where down is impossible though, you just have to continue
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- breckuh 8y agoAre there any links to actual data or a peer-reviewed article?
- foobarbecue 8y agoNo, Nautilus is a beautiful and interesting publication, but it's a pseudo-journal where people publish stuff they can't get into a real journal.
- aeorgnoieang 8y agoWhat evidence are you aware of that indicates that they're even trying to come across as a scientific journal? I'm pretty sure they're just a standard Science! publication, like Popular Science.
- foobarbecue 8y agoPopular Science, Newscientist, and their ilk generally report about research that's published elsewhere, or write about engineers and scientists. Nautilus, instead, publishes original research, written by engineers and scientists themselves. I am not trying to say that Nautilus is intentionally defrauding the public, but they are pioneering a new grey zone between journal and magazine.
- aeorgnoieang 8y agoYou're just repeating the claim for which I requested evidence. What's the basis for believing that they're publishing 'original research', instead of regular journalism? What's the basis for your claim that their writers are engineers and scientists? And why is this 'grey'-er than scientists or engineers writing anything other than scientific journal articles, e.g. books, magazine articles, essays, like they've always done?
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- wu-ikkyu 8y agoReading this reminded me of S.M., thr woman who literally cannot physically feel fear https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/S.M._(patient) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/S.M._(patient)
- stef25 8y agoHasn't met my mother in law
- foobarbecue 8y agoWeird to see this article doing the rounds again. I've spent a fair amount of time with Alex (climbing, doing jigsaw puzzles, etc). He's totally normal, just strong, motivated, and disciplined. Nautilus publishes a lot of pseudoscience that wouldn't be accepted in a peer-reviewed journal, and this is perfect example. A claim of reading personality based on fMRI study of a single person's brain, which shows slightly different bloodflow amounts in a particular place. NB: I haven't talked to him about this article so don't know what his opinion is on it.
- starpilot 8y agoWhat? Who are you?
- foobarbecue 8y agoI'm sort of barely related to Alex, (if you count girlfriend / boyfriend relationship as related!) so have been on a couple of family vacations with him. I'm not much of a climber -- managed to lead 5.12 sport single pitch a few times but these days I struggle with 11s. I will never forget when Alex talked me up a V2 I was spooked on! Super patient, nice guy.
- starpilot 8y agoHuh? 5.12 is elite amateur climber. Some people aren't able to do that after years of consistent climbing.
- PierceJoy 8y agoI disagree with that. As long as you keep your bodyweight in check, and climb consistently, 5.12 will be in reach. I started climbing a year ago, am just edging in to the overweight range of BMI, and am leading 5.11b. I see lots of people leading in the 5.12s who are not elite by any measure.
- starpilot 8y ago
- waitButWhy 8y agoI bet the truth is, when it comes to static imagery, Alex Honnold just registers as excitable about different subject matter. It sounds like they tried a largely negative gore-oriented image set (injuries and depictions of people in distress) to induce what could probably more accurately be interpretted as an unpleasant state of mind. For regular people of middling intellect who live sheltered lives, being subjected to strange viewing habits in a clinical setting probably registers as extremely odd. Alex, on the other hand approached the experiment after reaching a degree of celebrity that puts him beyond the possibility of an assessment that restricts him from acting freely. He didn't submit to the experiment, until his career was sufficiently rewarding enough to be innately recognized as highly skilled, and thus beyond the reach of ordinary doctors adjucating him as a threat to himself or others, and thus preventing him from doing what he loves. Therefore, nothing about the experimental setting was threatening, and he felt no pressure to masquerade with a "normal" response deceptively, or else attract psychiatric scrutiny, perhaps warranting medication and inviting pressure from family members and see other facets of his support network turn against him. With broad fame, he effectively deflects any ordinary institutional authority, and he has social proof of success, no matter what the machine records and reveals unexpectedly. So then, take other conceptual image sets, and see what does catch a rise out of Alex Honnold, and I bet you'll find he's as human as any of us. Show him sprawling incredible mountain vistas looking at the sun rise over a himalayan cloud deck, rivaling or far surpassing anything you could hope to see from the top of a tall building and I bet something jumps out from deeper within, than showing him images of a train wreck, because it has to be something real to him. Then the measurements will start showing numbers in keeping with other people's reaction to visual stimuli. In psychology subject matter specific to the individual counts, and Alex has different tastes.
- bdamm 8y agoOr perhaps a rope, dangling 20ft too short, would trigger him. I think you’re right. His “mental armor” technique is noteworthy, though. People often overlook the very significant training he undertook.
- Fricken 8y agoYes, it should come as no surprise that someone who has dedicated themselves to managing their fear is good at managing their fear. He is not immune to panic, but he is very good at pulling himself together and carrying on.
- moab9 8y agoa lot like a raccoon's apparently.
- manmal 8y agoThat’s an interesting quote to me: “But it could be the case that he has such a well-honed regulatory system that he can say, ‘OK, I’m feeling all this stuff, my amygdala is going off,’ but his frontal cortex is just so powerful that it can calm him down.” I didn’t know that the frontal cortex can calm one down. Is that what happens in „normal people“ who are very stress resistant?
- ablation 8y agoIs this similar to the kind of control that Wim Hoff has been seen to exert when in cold situations, I wonder?
- YeGoblynQueenne 8y ago>> He might insist that he feels fear (he describes standing on Thank God Ledge as “surprisingly scary”), but he has become a paramount symbol of fearlessness. So, this is how to not do science: "This man has no fear. How does he do it? We scanned his brain and found he has no fear!". It's not like you should automatically discard any experiment that justifies cultural expectations. But you should be really, really suspicious of any such result. On a side note (and more controversially) modern neuroscience, with its fMRI conjectures, is starting to look a lot like craniometry.
- mpweiher 8y ago> cultural expectations "Cultural" expectations?? Anyway, yes, this is not a double-blind statistical experiment. Then again, particularly in neuroscience, great leaps in our understanding have occurred due to single cases, see Phineas Gage https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/phineas-gage-neurosciences-most-famous-patient-11390067/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/phineas-gage-neurosci...
- YeGoblynQueenne 8y ago>> "Cultural" expectations?? Also, "stereotypes", "common sense" etc. In other words, whatever is popularly taken to be true. You know, what the Dothraki declare as "it is known".
- pbhjpbhj 8y agoIsn't it just an outworking of monism - the brain is a machine, a part of that machine must be responsible for a particular function. People who injure specific regions lose specific abilities. Magnetic stimulation of particular regions leads to different feelings, etc.. It doesn't seem that misguided as a first approximation?
- YeGoblynQueenne 8y agoThe problem is with collecting evidence for what you take to be the truth in the first place. It's called confirmation bias and it has nothing to do with methodology, instruments, or techniques. What goes wrong is in the space between the experiment and the interpretation of the experiment: if you set out to prove something you already hold to be the truth, you're very likely to "prove" it regardless of what your data, or your results, actually say. It might sound strange, but the right way to conduct a study is not to start with a hypothesis and gather evidence to support it. Instead, what you're supposed to do (but nobody ever does) is to first collect some observations, then come up with an hypothesis to explain them, then collect more, new evidence and test whether this new evidence supports the hypothesis. Otherwise, you risk collecting only the evidence that supports your hypothesis- or interpreting it in a way that supports it. Not that doing things "the right way" keeps you safe, either. In practice, everyone will have preconceptions and already-formed ideas about what is true and what is not and no amount of good practice will completely protect you from drawing the conclusions you prefer from whatever data you collect. So, when you see a study that starts out with the premise that "this man is fearless" concluding that "this man's brain can feel no fear" it should ring all the alarm bells and raise all the red flags. Especially so if the study (or at least the article reporting it) stresses the subject's fearlessness continuously. In short, this study seems to have found exactly what the researchers expected to find. That's as bad as it gets.
- mikec3010 8y agoI'm an online fan of his after watching many videos on yt. What surprises me is that he (and all the climbers I've seen) aren't "ripped". For being able to pull himself straight up half dome, I would expect the body to layer on a lot more muscle. Also, I hope he stops free soloing. It's amazing he can do that, but it's not fair to all his fans who would be devastated if we lost him.
- Zeebrommer 8y agoThat's a paradoxical thing to say, since you probably discovered him through his free soloing. You might not have been his fan had he not free solo'd.
- mikec3010 8y agoThat is true, the free soloing is the eye catcher. But he has a very likeable and relatable personality too. I would be really sad if something happened to him.
- aeorgnoieang 8y agoPeople frequently dying doing roped climbing too, even the most experience and skilled climbers; and often of stupid mistakes or random hazards. But more importantly, it's probably better to let people do the things they love as long as they're not directly hurting others. Surely the feelings of fans shouldn't override the preferences of the object of their fanaticism.
- mikec3010 8y agoAnd people doing roped climbing often fall and recover just fine, which is impossible to do when you...dont have a rope. I agree that nobody should be prevented from doing risky things. But when they become "famous" I believe it reckless to disregard the feelings of their fans.
- k3lsi3r 8y agoWhile I disagree with your assertion that Honnold isn't "ripped" (a word for which we seem to have different definitions) it is worth noting that the primary muscles(/tendons) used in climbing are hand/forearm based and you can do quite well even with everything else being significantly weaker in comparison.
- otakucode 8y agoStudies like this are always interesting to me in that they tread the line between neuroscience and philosophy. They show that a persons philosophical outlook and thinking controls a great deal of how we process and respond to the world. It's unfortunate that our societies usual reaction to attempting to help those who have experienced trauma by getting them to deal with it and move past it is to decry that as somehow 'victim blaming' or minimizing the trauma. Our brains are amazingly adaptable. We can be trained to be utterly fragile, or amazingly resilient. When shown an image like those shown to Alex to elicit arousal, a person can either identify with the subjects in the photo (an act which actually takes a great deal of mental effort, since images are so profoundly different from reality), or recognize it as an image and deal with it solely as it actually is. Whether you do one or another has substantial consequences for you subjectively. And of course no one but yourself can make that kind of choice.